Sport as a metaphor for life – Not!

Almost everything is being made into a competition these days to get our attention, but is competition good in our daily lives?

From the time we go to school, we are encouraged to participate in sport, mostly by being relegated to a 'house', sometimes simply being a colour, for which we are expected to exhibit great enthusiasm. That is a rather arbitrary form of loyalty, but it sets us on the path of being unnecessarily biased in how we relate to others, rather than choosing our loyalties based on our own criteria. Even if some choose to change their minds, they still tend to choose to bias their loyalty by choosing another team, rather than opt out of such arbitrary loyalties altogether.

But does such competition really serve us in the rest of our lives?

While sports may be a means of improving ourselves, our working and personal lives generally do not rely on a competitive attitude. Except for a few teams working upon assessing competitors, most of our working lives revolves around ways of working together with everyone we come in contact with. We don't want anyone to be the losers in some arbitrary competition, because the company or organisation for which we work will suffer, usually by increased overheads, or distracting loss of correctly-directed effort. In fact, we really need to want everybody to be the best they can be.

A competitive attitude wants others to lose, and continue to lose, which can only undermine morale. Rather than directing our thoughts toward bettering the organisation, competition seeks to view our fellow workers as some enemy to be bettered by us. That is rather small-minded, and more akin to promoting cancer as a means of health, just because cancer cells grow faster, where that growth is at the expense of the whole. In sports, the goal is to win, with team cooperation just a means to that end.

A competitive attitude only creates disharmony among family members. Families rely upon a lot of self-sacrifice. They help us to realise the emotional reality that we are part of something to which we must give of ourselves freely, in order for our own lives to be enriched.

If a parent is especially devoted to a particular team, they will tend to expect their children to follow it, as well as expecting them to perform well in their school sports. Instilling such arbitrary biases in their children is running counter to helping them to be what they can do best, which is the best that a parent can do. Teaching children blind loyalty is setting them up to be manipulated by those they look up to, but who may not deserve it.

To become their own person, children have to learn to trust their own judgement, learning through their own experience, but heavily guided by their parents, teachers and peers. If they are trained early to follow blindly, without consideration of true merit, they have to suppress their own judgement to fit in. They have been sabotaged.

If they later realise this, they will have a lower opinion of those who manipulated them, and justly so, because those who are particularly one-eyed about their sports teams tend to be uncompromisingly opinionated about other parts of life, leading to lots of butting heads. Being assertive is one thing, and necessary to stand up for what one believes, but being uncompromisingly biased is another.

Sport is often promoted as a way of getting fit, but is the risk of injuries and the level of fitness required for competing in excess of what we need for living our lives?

In contact sports, this leads to more injuries than we would get in any other activity. That results in downtime at work and reduced capacity to tend to our families. Also, with sport requiring being focused upon what is going on around us, rather than what is happening in our bodies at the time, we are more likely to destructively overstretch our bodies.

Because sports require many skills not necessary to the rest of our lives, they require effort in excess of what is really necessary to be healthy enough for the other parts of our lives. We often have to do a lot more exercise and eat more than if we did what is sufficient to be healthy.

The amount of exercise to be healthy depends upon what our work is, but will tend to be a lot less in effort and time than if engaged in any sport. Just walking can be enough for most to be healthy. Basically, doing just enough exercise to be fit for the other parts of our lives will give us the most time for those other parts.

Winning implies losing, and high-profile sports requires few winners and relegates the rest to being losers, but is this a good attitude for living?

Except for a few losers who get to remain in a competition a little longer, everyone else but the winners is relegated to being a spectator. So, instead of finding out what we might be better at, these sports want us to pay to fund them, and spend time following them. We become fodder that feeds the perpetuation of a business model that relies upon elitism.

Sports organisations try to get us to believe the opposite, as we see with the Rugby World Cup using the the inspiring World in Union song as if a full-on competition promotes the sentiment of the song. It is a blatant lie trying to con us into thinking that such competitions actually somehow benefit us all. Sports are really all about being the winner because so much future revenue depends upon it. It is hijacking fans' sentiments in service of that overriding goal that sports use such songs to distract us from what they are really doing.

Like many forms of entertainment, sports try to get us to buy into the belief that we can be among the best, but for most, the cards are stacked against us, typically because we have so many other responsibilities to fulfil that we cannot devote the time required to be successful in such a pursuit.

There are efforts to promote sports careers as a balance to academic pursuits.

The fact is that very few will be able to have a sports career compared to almost any other profession, so the promotion is quite disingenuous, especially considering that student's time is better spent on schooling, rather than sports, in creating opportunities for a career. If anything, self-improvement exercises, rather than sports, would be more conducive to study, as they would require less time to perform, and be less likely to end in injuries.

Top end sports rely heavily upon spectators spending on attending and buying merchandice, rather than participating in the sport itself.

How many refer to how their team went on the weekend? But how many actually played in the team? Almost none. That highlights the essentially vicarious nature of sports. That is, for most, sports is a sedentary talking point, rather than a truly participatory activity. Sports organisations are attempting to spin that being an emotionally charged spectator is the major driver for their team's commitment, as if huge salaries and their bustling merchandising industry is secondary.

Yes, it is true that their followers' enthusiasm is key, but sports organisations don't really need, nor want, high levels of sports participation. That would tend to put pressure on them to allow more participation in the decision-making process, especially in the money distribution. No, small numbers of sportspeople, but high numbers of arms-length paying spectators suit sports organisations quite well.

While women's sports are receiving higher recognition at this time, and it could be seen as a sign of approaching equality, it affects so very few women that the publicity is just spin that serves to rope in more female spectators. Australian aboriginal cricket teams have been playing for over a century, but that has had practically no effect on the health and opportunity outcomes for most aboriginals, which are far below the country's standard. The highly-charged nature of elite sports is such that even elite players get racially abused by spectators. Don't rely upon sports for equality.

Basically, sport is entertainment, but it is promoted emotionally as if you must believe it is really important to you.

Like most entertainment, to contain advertising budgets, sports promotion requires a few recognisable people that become their 'faces', rewarding them hugely. However, that relegates the rest to having to survive on the dregs, or fund themselves. Those faces are often promoted as heroes, though they have nothing in common with those who actually risk their lives in service to others. Heroes usually earn that title because they have mostly died as a result of their self-sacrifice, but sports heroes do no such thing.

However, the most insidious aspect of sport is their monster merchandising efforts to reap more money to perpetuate their false competitions, sucking up funds that their followers could put to use in improving their own lives, rather than supporting a pyramid belief scheme. Without that misplaced belief, sports would collapse.

Many sports teams used to be seen as representatives of a locale, and followers imagined their own lives' fortunes fluctuated with their team's wins or losses, as they were often powerless to actually change their own station in life. Their teams bound them in vicarious comradeship. However, once teams started disconnecting from particular locales, usually resulting from changing demographics, the masters of the sport realised they had to drum up support from the new demographics by working up a belief frenzy in them.

Entertainment serves a very important role of enabling us to disconnect from the stresses of our daily lives. That sports then try to bind us into their world of stress highlights how desperate they are to keep their profitable money streams. But then a lot of entertainment forms are trying to position themselves as being central to our lives, above and beyond what we give to them by our beliefs.

Perhaps we need to choose our entertainment so we have some distraction from life's pressures, but not so much that it supplants them with its own. See humour and chances for levity in the minutiae of our own lives.

The competitive nature of sport can help develop some aggressive attitudes.

While they may be useful in the drive to achieve, for most of life's tasks, aggression is disruptive, and not in a good way, as it is focused on aggrandising ourselves rather than what benefits all.

Many confuse aggression and assertiveness. Assertiveness is required to stand up for an idea or outcome, but with the attitude that there is no loss if it is not accepted, as all you are trying to do is get it a fair airing. Conversely, aggression requires the idea or outcome be accepted, and that any others lose. Assertiveness highlights possibilities, whereas aggressiveness divides and suppresses.

Many so-called sports are sanctioned violence, in which many of the actions would be illegal in any other situation.

If two people started punching each-other in the street, they would be arrested, yet if we put gloves on their hands, put them in a ring and call it boxing, we are supposed to celebrate it. This is the insanity many call a noble sport, but it is nothing but public violence, and the fact that it is celebrated sends the message to those growing up that violence is legitimate. Those indulging in it get damaged, but all the ads for it do not carry any disclaimers about how damaging it is or that it is illegal in any other situation.

Contact sports are similarly celebrated, with enthusiastic public support actively courted, despite the many injuries players receive. Children are encouraged to see this tribalised violence as worthy of support and even as a lucrative career. What sort of people are we turning our children into when we put these types of activities and the attitudes they require on pedestals?

Most societies have great difficulties acknowledging rampant domestic violence, let alone getting enough funds to combat it, yet we collectively spend many, many times as much money, both corporate and public, on promoting opportunities to encourage such public displays of violence. How seriously are we really tackling the attitudes that lead to violence against women and children when we publicly promote the same attitudes in each generation as some sort of worthy national pastime? It is time we see that there is something wrong with this picture!

Increasingly, sport is being used by authoritarian regimes to deflect from their human rights records.

Sport is often perceived as a way of engaging in an opportunity to convert some nefarious regimes into being more open and democratic, or as a way to make society be more inclusive of minorities. This is of course a myth perpetuated by the sporting bodies to keep themselves relevant.

There was an Australian aboriginal cricket team over 150 years ago, but aboriginal death rates are today at about twice that of non-indigenous Australian. We don't know about death rates for the first 100 years of that duration because indigenous peoples were not even included on the census. Cricket gave a very few an opportunity to play, but like most other sports, most were left behind.

Sports has been the door to get into peoples' consciousness by hijacking their emotional loyalties for a long time. There is a reason all the tobacco, alcohol and gambling industries have been using sport to promote their socially destructive wares for decades.

Authoritarian regimes using sport to push their agenda is not a modern phenomena, as Hitler was hoping to use the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 to push the idea of the white Aryan master race. Jesse Owens' win symbolised the fallacy of that idea, and while some black athletes reign supreme in many sports, the general opportunities for blacks in the USA are much lower than for whites. No change for the status quo there.

Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes are throwing huge fortunes at enticing international sports in their countries to present an image of modern societies, all with the willing complicity of international sporting organisations and elite athletes bathing in their money. This aims to take over the daily news narrative from human right groups' pointing out their human rights violations. It also helps the sporting organisations deflect from their long-term sexual abuse coverups. Matches made in abuser heaven.

In Australia, rather than provide funds for measures to improve the support services for struggling people, parties have engaged in driving voter support by promising substantially upgraded sporting facilities in marginal electorates. Sort of represents the way even those using it see sports: an expensive but empty gesture that does nothing to improve the actual wellbeing of people. In essence, sports is like fairy tale magic dust that makes everybody think they are better off.

Fortunately, the sports ruses are being shown up for their con more often, but there are millions who still believe sport is something important in their lives, and thus open themselves up to manipulation by those who just want their money, no matter what harm they cause.

Sports teams are seen as useful investments for billionaires, where they prey on fans' adoration to obtain public funding.

In Australia, we have seen promises by political parties of provision or upgrading of sports facilities as a means of gaining votes. This is preying on sports being more important in voters' minds than worthwhile community facilities that actually benefit all in those communities. This is playing politics with public funds but which then require those communities to fund the maintenance of those facilities. They are expensive open spaces that are mostly seating and carparks which sit empty for most of the time. Hardly vibrant centres of community activity!

But these political rip-offs pale in comparison to the extortion that billionaire owners of sports teams in the US exercise over local governments. Billionaires buy NFL teams, then lobby for massive public funds to build huge stadiums that they must then provide ongoing maintenance for, but have no say over how they are run. If they don't provide the funding, they are faced with threats to move the teams elsewhere, using their fans' love of their team as leverage over politicians elected by those fans.

The team owners exercise full control over what the facilities are used for, including who can buy naming rights, what tickets cost, and take a cut of sales of foods by those franchises they allow to sell in them. These are callous money-making enterprises funded mostly by cash-strapped local governments caught in a political bind, and all because fans are so deluded by their adoration of a team that they mistakenly identify with, but which do no more than extract their money that could be better spent on enduring benefits to their families. They are an expensive form of fake identity.

Then there are those who buy sports teams to use them as vehicles to launder their ill-gotten money. Major sports clubs turn over millions of dollars per day, often in amounts that are too small to raise the ire of anti-money-laundering authorities. Just funneling dirty money through a myriad front companies to purchase a team leads to a steady supply of legitimate income. This is how criminal organisations have converted their illegal bounty into legitimate income streams for over a century, but now how oligarchs from Russia and other totalitarian regimes are setting themselves up in the West.

These sports-based extortion rackets rely upon us believing that our teams are somehow an essential part of our identity, but they are just another front used by billionaires to get hold of our personal and community funds while pretending they are our champions. They are just another con used by those with too much money to get more. The more we let go of the delusions of the fake identity peddled by them, the sooner we can take back control of our societies and make governments work for us, and not those who do not care about us at all.

Many push sports for self-improvement, but we do not have to take on a whole competitive regime to be better.

Being involved in sports puts us under pressure to conform to what others, many of whom don't really care about our needs, decide is best for us, though what they really want is for us to fulfil their agenda. If we cannot do that, through injury, or it not really being within our capabilities, we are discarded and forgotten, often copping some abuse on the way from disgruntled fans.

Fitness does not require performing potentially dangerous or straining activities, but just enough movement, often enough, to have a body adequate to support the rest of our life's activities. If we want to improve ourselves, we decide what and when to do that, rather than that be defined by others' expectations of us, and what we should do.

For some, having a coach push to perform may help with motivation, but reliance on that means that that motivation is not within, often resulting in a relapse to former habits when that pushing is withdrawn. We have to own our own motivation to really improve.

It's our life, and we need to get to a place where we are defining who we are, what we want to be, and so what sort of body and attitudes we need to fulfil that. We can get appropriate help to do that, but only for as long as we need. We don't need to buy into other people's agendas. Live our own lives, under our own terms!